Newell thought for a moment. “He told us Larry Yoder had told him all about shooting Weaver’s horse. Back when Weston took him out to his parents’ house on Thursday afternoon.”
Branden shifted in his chair. “Why’d he wait this long to tell you that?”
“I don’t know. He said he didn’t take it seriously at first, knowing Yoder as he did. But then he had just heard we were trying for a search warrant and thought maybe he could help.”
Branden remembered a small detail from the accident scene and observed, “This whole thing is starting to make some sense to me, Bobby. Do you have Ricky Niell’s notes from the accident?”
Newell rose and walked out to Ellie’s radio consoles. “See if you can raise Niell,” he said. “Ask him where his notes are on the Weaver accident.”
Back in the office, Newell found Branden sitting on the edge of his chair, hands cradling his forehead. Soon Ellie had an answer and retrieved Niell’s notebook from a file drawer in the squad room. She carried it into the sheriff’s office and laid it on the desk. As she stood there, Branden roused from his thoughts, looked around, and saw Niell’s spiral notebook. Newell handed it to him, and Branden said, “Thanks,” distantly.
“You’ve figured something out?” Newell inquired.
Branden shrugged, said, “Maybe,” and left the captain sitting at his desk.
As he paged through Ricky Niell’s notebook, Branden walked the block and a half north to the
Holmes Gazette.
He asked to see Nancy Blain, was directed to the second floor, and found her coming out of a back room. As she came forward, Branden said, “Nancy, I need your help.”
Blain motioned him to her black metal desk, next to a bank of matching file cabinets. She took a seat at the desk, and Branden said, standing, “I remember your taking photographs at the accident the day J. R. Weaver was killed.”
She nodded.
“I’d like to borrow those prints for the afternoon.”
Blain said, “I never thanked you for what you did for Eric last year.”
Branden remembered the tranquil summer afternoon when they had talked about Eric Bromfield, while she took photos of an Amish valley.
Her hair was still short. She was dressed in brown leather walking shoes, jeans, and a simple white blouse. She took off a pair of glasses and dropped them into the center desk drawer, saying, “OSHA doesn’t let you wear contacts in darkrooms anymore,” and added, “Thanks for Eric, Professor.”
Branden said, “I’m glad I was of some help,” and “I’ll only need them for a few hours.”
Blain turned to the file cabinet nearest to her desk. From the second drawer, she drew several folders of six-by-nine prints, and laid them on her desk for the professor. “They’re all numbered, but try to keep them in order anyway.”
Branden tucked the folders under his left arm, shook her hand, and said, “Thanks.”
“You’ll bring them back today?” she asked.
“I might need them until tomorrow, but I doubt it. Probably later this afternoon.”
Blain said, “OK,” and Branden headed for his car, leafing through the photos as he walked. Halfway through the stack, he spotted one photo in particular, and stopped beside his car to study it, a shot of a dull yellow Ford F150 pickup, with its windows rolled down and a splinter of wood with tatters of ripped black cloth lying across the windshield. Branden eased in behind the wheel, laid the photos on the passenger’s seat of his car, noted the number on the back of the photo, and wrote in a spiral notebook:
Photo 28—Windows Down.
At his house, Branden dropped Blain’s photographs on the kitchen table and checked the one phone message indicated on his answering machine. It was Ricky Niell, saying, “Doc, the captain asked me to give you an update: I checked on Dobrowski. He was sleeping off an all-night drunk in the Wayne County Jail when Sommers’s house was torched. I called Wooster to verify that, so he’s got an alibi.”
Branden deleted the message, sat down with the photos, and flipped through the little spiral book, laying out certain photos when they matched Niell’s account. He became more anxious each time he read Niell’s notes from the accident scene and from the interviews with MacAfee, Weston, and Kent. And then he had it. The whole of it, wrapped up neatly with a bow.
The phone rang, and he rose slowly from the table and answered it.
“Mike, this is Henry DiSalvo.”
Branden didn’t speak at first.
“The will, Mike.”
“Weaver’s?”
“Right. I’m going to read it Wednesday morning. Only two people are to be present. Andy Weaver and one witness of his choosing. Other relatives are to be informed by post.”
“Strange,” Branden said and glanced back at the photos spread out on the kitchen table. “Say, I don’t think I’ll need that appointment at 11:00 A.M., but why couldn’t you read the will earlier?”
DiSalvo chuckled. “Weaver had stipulated that I was to wait to see which of his relatives would inquire about his money. All of them have, now, except Andy Weaver. He alone has made no inquiries whatsoever.”
Back at the kitchen table, Branden slowly closed Ricky Niell’s notes, and put Blain’s photos back in order. He smiled, rapped his knuckles on the tabletop, and sat down with his arms folded over his chest. One person’s movements had given it away. Even the motive was there, plainly in view all along. It only remained to verify certain facts. To discover how things were done, and when.
29
Tuesday, August 15
11:00 A.M.
ON THE stretch of 515 that runs in front of Weaver’s house, Branden pulled his car onto the right berm facing north, and turned his hazard flashers on. He opened Ricky Niell’s notebook and again read the entries for the first interviews with MacAfee, Weston, and Kent. Then he flipped back to the second interviews, read them slowly and wrote:
First Interviews!
in his spiral notebook.
By reference to photos 26 through 29, Branden was able to back his sedan precisely to the spot where the yellow truck had stopped at the time of the accident. He rolled his windows down and sat listening. Over the crest of the hill just beyond Weaver’s drive, he saw a brief puff of black smoke. A semi crested the hill, came down past Weaver’s drive, and went by in the oncoming lane. Branden wrote
Schrauzer!—
on a line in his notebook.
He turned his gaze left and studied the burned field on the other side of the road. At the far edge of the field, he could see the break in the trees where Yoder’s trail came out of the woods. In his notebook he wrote:
Yoder in plain view.
Branden pushed all of the photos he had used back into their folders and stacked the folders on the floor, where they’d be less likely to slide around. Then he started his engine, pulled forward on the road, and turned left into Weaver’s drive. As he made the turn, he saw another belch of diesel smoke over the hill. He watched in his rearview mirror, and a semi passed by on the road behind him. On the line where he had written
Schrauzer!—
he added
SMOKE.
Branden parked his car in the drive, walked around to the back of the house, and tried the door to Weaver’s study. It was locked. He took out a credit card, worked it into the slot between door and frame, at the point where the latch would be, and pushed. The latch gave, and the door opened. He closed it, and in his notebook he wrote:
Yoder got at the rifle easily enough.
Back in front, Branden stood at the end of Weaver’s drive, on the spot where the horse had fallen beside the road. He found a clear line of sight to Yoder’s shooting position across the field.
Line of shot unobstructed.
At Yoder’s trailer, under the carport, Branden found a new red plastic gas container in plain sight. He checked at the back of the house and found two rusted metal gas cans lined up beside the skirting on the trailer. The cans appeared to be about the same vintage as the mower that stood nearby. He returned to the front, and put the new gas container in the bed of his pickup.
He came down Yoder’s gravel drive, drove up the hill to Walnut Creek, went through town past the restaurant and the Inn, and took Rt. 39 back to Millersburg. There he found that Missy Taggert had gone to the hospital in Akron. He left the gas can on her autopsy table and wrote a note asking that she compare the residue in the can with the samples Niell had collected at the fire scene.
While still at Pomerene Hospital, the professor made two calls, one to Holmes Estates in Cleveland, and one to the hospital in Dover.
At Britta Sommers’s place, Branden parked beside the brick ranch house and walked onto the back patio. Shards of glass were cast about on the flagstones. A line of yellow spray paint marked the run of blackened stone where a gasoline fuse had burnt toward Sommers’s back door. Near the woods, about thirty yards from the house, a yellow circle had been painted on the grass to mark the origin of the fuse. On his hands and knees, Branden felt delicately in the grass and soon found other slivers of window glass. A spar stuck in his palm, and as he worked to remove it, he got up and turned to inspect the trunk of the nearest tree. He saw that it, too, had been peppered with flying glass. In his notebook, he entered:
Too short a fuse.
Inside the house, it appeared that nothing had been touched. The place was still a cluttered mess, even where the fire hadn’t reached. Branden tried unsuccessfully to match this image with the meticulous office Britta had kept.
Signs of a search.
With this written, he stepped back through the rubble in the kitchen and noted the place in the study where someone had pulled papers out of Britta’s files and made a point of burning them separately.
Needed to destroy files
went into his notebook.
Outside again, Branden took his pocketknife and began working one of the larger pieces of glass from the trunk of a tree. With his back turned to the house, he heard the metallic clicks and snappings of a lever-action rifle being chambered and cocked. Without surprise, he turned slowly to see Jimmy Weston pointing a carbine at his chest.
“Figured you wouldn’t let it be,” Weston said. “What gave me away?”
“Backfires, Jimmy,” Branden said pointedly.
“I don’t get it,” Weston said.
“You didn’t tell Ricky Niell you heard a backfire the first time he talked to you out at Weaver’s accident.”
“That’s all?”
“Your windows were down, Jimmy.”
“Air conditioner’s on the fritz.”
“You, most of all, should have heard the shot. I figure you heard it well enough, and probably saw Yoder, too, over by the trees.”
Weston nodded grimly. “It took a couple of minutes to figure the whole thing out. Murder Britta, frame Yoder, and all. But I reasoned that when the deputy came around again, I should tell him I heard a backfire just like everyone else.”
“That phone call, supposedly from the Dover hospital. That was weak,” Branden commented.
“Got cut up with the explosion,” Weston said. “What else could I do?”
“You should have left Britta alone in the first place!” Branden shot.
“You’re the only one who knows about any of this, Branden.”
“I’ve turned in everything I have to the sheriff’s office,” Branden proclaimed.
“Sure you have, Professor. How could I expect anything less? But I won’t be around long enough for that to matter.”
“I wrote it all down, Jimmy. Gave it to Captain Newell. I’m surprised he hasn’t arrested you by now.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“I am not, Jimmy.”
“So let’s hear it,” Weston challenged.
“OK. Monday. You got to Yoder early in the evening. Kept him drunk for the next couple of days. Drunk and off his lithium. You, if anyone, would have known what that would do to him, as unpredictable as he was on the job. Tuesday you’ll have made one last try, talking Britta out of it. That didn’t work, so Wednesday night, you killed her at her home. Or maybe it was early Thursday morning.
“Next, you set fire to her house, drove her body to Yoder’s, and planted her in his trunk and the gas can in his carport. You also arranged some things for us at the trailer, like the rifle and 30-06 cartridges we found. Probably those hunting photos in a dresser drawer, too. I’ll bet you even typed the letter we found in Yoder’s printer. Then you drove Yoder to his parents’ house, ostensibly because you were worried about him.
“Friday, you made a point of calling Becker. It was just good fortune that I was there when he took that call. But that cemented your alibi for the cuts on your face. Then you sat tight.
“But by Monday, you couldn’t take the pressure anymore, so you gave Newell that tip. Got us a warrant for Yoder’s home. Does that about cover it, Weston?”
Weston was agitated. He circled around behind Branden, jammed the muzzle of the rifle between his shoulder blades, and pushed the professor down the slope, onto the back patio, and around to the side driveway where Branden’s car was parked beside the house.
“Open your trunk, Professor.”
Branden took keys out of his jeans pocket, unlocked the trunk, and slowly lifted the lid.
Holding himself several paces back, Weston said, “Now get inside and toss me the keys.”
Branden complied, dropped the keys on the ground near the bumper, and waited, kneeling in the bottom of his trunk.
“Lie down with your back to me,” Weston commanded.
“You’re not going to get away with this, Jimmy.”
“Lie down, Professor, and shut up.”
Once Branden was curled up with his back to the rear, Weston came forward slowly, holding the rifle on Branden. He bent quickly to pick up the keys, reached up with his left hand, and slammed the trunk lid shut.
His voice muffled from inside the trunk, Branden shouted, “I wrote it all down for Bobby Newell, Weston. You’re not helping yourself any,” and immediately began the slow task of turning himself around inside the small trunk.